


Like the Lichen

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Naruto
Genre: Autonomy Issues, Background past SasoDei, Black Zetsu being the worst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Deidara having a mental breakdown in the background, Fucked Up Relationships, Gen, Grief, Is it still interpersonal conflict if they share a body?, Past Relationship(s), Which Zetsu lowkey enables
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29876253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: "It's not a lie to say that Zetsu is a person. It just obscures the truth."Black Zetsu notices White Zetsu having some troublingly person-like thoughts, and sets about squashing them.
Relationships: Black Zetsu & White Zetsu (Naruto), Deidara & Zetsu (Naruto)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	Like the Lichen

**Author's Note:**

> For Trope Madness Event: Dark Fic
> 
> This was originally supposed to be for a fic challenge in the last few days of 2020, under the prompt 'Akatsuki members in their home villages.' I decided to challenge myself by trying to have Zetsu "visit his home village," then promptly went through a two-month period where writing was like pulling teeth.

The line between the individual and the multitude was blurrier than humans imagined it to be. The life cycle of many, many organisms involved one immature individual becoming many mature ones. The egg of a jellyfish, for example, did not slowly grow into a single medusa, but rather fell to the ocean floor and became a polyp that would bud off untold numbers of adult clones, so that each egg went from one living, juvenile “individual” to many adult “individuals.” Some creatures that at first glance appeared to be a singular entity, like lichen or corals, turned out to be close partnerships between very different species. Even those who were a single individual their whole lives were not really as “individual” as all that. Plants and animals cultivated all sorts of microbes in their bodies that they needed to function properly. One needed a particularly narrow mind to look at the variety of environments and biomes contained in the human body, the dynamic ecosystems of bacteria and viruses and parasites that populated those ecosystems, at the cells that made their lives possible, which themselves contained foreign cells long ago domesticated and reimagined as “mitochondria”, and declare that a human was a singular entity. 

So it wasn’t really a lie to say that Zetsu was a person. It just obscured the truth. 

As Black Zetsu’s lies went, this one barely registered. He and White Zetsu were like a lichen; a partnership so close and so integral to their success that their identities had subsumed each other. Without Black Zetsu, White Zetsu was just a mushy lump of cells and potential stuck in the Tree. Without White Zetsu, Black Zetsu was physically limited in unacceptable ways. 

Together, they need not rely on whispers in the dark to guide history into its proper shape. 

However, a sense of disquiet had grown in Black Zetsu of late. Being so intimately attached to his partner as he was, he was in a unique position to notice changes as they occurred. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something was off with White Zetsu lately. A shift in the cadence of his words, perhaps, or a hint of thought in a coexistence that should have been thoughtless. 

Things like this:

“You’ve been angry lately, Deidara,” White Zetsu said to the blonde storm cloud walking to their left. “I’d hoped Tobi could cheer you up, but you only seem to have gotten angrier since you started working together.”

“That’s because Tobi is a little pissant,” Deidara snarled. “It’s like he  _ wants _ to make every little thing into a production.”

“I’m sorry, Senpai! I’m still new to this whole secret organization business, you know. I put myself in your care.”

Tobi bounded across Zetsu’s path to bow dramatically to Deidara. Deidara’s eye twitched. 

“You can start by quitting your stupid hand-waving and pointless running around, yeah.”

Tobi peaked up at Deidara from his comically low bow.

“But I thought you liked hand-waving and running around, Senpai. Your old  _ Sasori-no-danna _ was always doing those things, and I know you miss him, even though you won’t admit it.”

Zetsu  _ felt _ Deidara’s anger on his skin. His chakra was all over the place, burning bright enough to make him want to squint and flaring unpredictably, like a panicking dog lashing out randomly at imagined adversaries. 

“Listen here, you little  _ cretin, _ Sasori-no-danna was  _ nothing  _ like-”

“I’m impressed, Deidara,” White Zetsu interrupted. “How do you stay so angry all the time? I don’t think I’ve seen you at peace since capturing the One-Tail.”

Deidara bristled like a porcupine. 

“I’ve got a lot to be pissed about, yeah.”

“Hmm,” White Zetsu offered noncommittally. “Your passion is admirable. Sometimes I wish I could hold onto anger as well as you do, but steadiness has it’s good points too.”

Black Zetsu didn’t react outwardly to White Zetsu’s words, but unease curdled deep inside him at his partner’s words. 

_ I wish I could hold onto anger… _

The chatterbox wasn’t supposed to have desires beyond completing their objectives. Whatever wants they’d had should have been completely consumed by the Tree. Even more disturbing, those words made it sound as though White Zetsu had felt  _ anger _ since being pulled from the Tree. That should not be. Irritation was fine- after all, sometimes they had to deal with unreasonable people or their plans suffered a setback. Black Zetsu himself was prone to irritation.

But anger? That was dangerous enough for  _ him, _ and he only needed to maintain a clear head in order to follow the plan to revive his Mother. 

The dark mass of his body dug a little deeper into White Zetsu’s side. If he was missing such worrying developments, then he clearly needed to shore up their partnership. 

* * *

Zetsu let Tobi think that the way he moved through the ground between distant places was like his Kamui, but in reality it couldn’t be more different. When he sank into the earth, he didn’t go to some dark, lifeless side-dimension; he simply entered a vibrant, life-filled layer of the world of which shinobi, short-sighted and self-obsessed creatures that they were, lived in ignorance. 

Great knots and intrepid, exploratory strands of roots mixed with the mesh-like weave of underground fungal communities and sheltered thriving communities of bacteria and viruses and bugs and forgotten creatures that subsisted on minute amounts of rotten chakra that leeched from dead bodies into the soil, and Zetsu swam along these complex networks to reach his destination. As he went, the earth whispered secrets to him in chemical signals and mutated bacterial genes spreading out into whole populations like ever-expanding ripples. 

Inside the earth, White Zetsu almost felt like he was in the Tree again. It was a sensation that brought Black Zetsu great satisfaction. 

He swam and swam through a world where time had no meaning until the chakra pulses of two particular rings finally reached him and gave him a lodestar to follow.

That would be Deidara and Tobi, on their way to complete the mission he’d given them “from Leader-sama.” 

He smiled, deep down under the ground where no one could see it and honed in on his targets. 

As he drew close underfoot, he could hear their voices as though from underwater and feel the echoing vibrations of their footfalls overhead. 

“Look, Senpai! Look at all those puppets! My my, there’s so much variety! Small ones, big ones, wood ones,  _ scary _ ones-” 

“Shut your annoying mouth Tobi!”

“But Dei~da~ra, doesn’t it remind you of your old partner? He liked puppets as much as you like explosions, right? I can’t picture him making the sort of faces you do when you blow something up, but-”

Tobi shrieked and leaped to the side as a small explosion went off not far above the ground. 

“Look, Tobi, my patience isn’t endless, yeah? So quit pushing it!”

Zetsu smiled and slid up out of the ground, up through the roots and into the xylem and then the bark of a tree, then let just his face peek back out into the world. 

Tobi and Deidara had come to a stop near the outer edge of a thriving town called Kocchimachi. Tobi had woven a light genjutsu around them, allowing Deidara to glare menacingly at the celebrating townsfolk without drawing undue attention to them. Deidara himself did not seem to have noticed the genjutsu. 

Instead, his attention was focused on a wheelbarrow full of smashed-up puppets being carted towards the center of town by a middle-aged civilian woman. She joined a rough line of people hauling the dregs of Sasori’s tools of conquest towards the main town square. 

“Look at them, yeah,” Deidara grumbled. “Not even a month ago and these losers would cower at the very mention of Sasori no Danna’s name. But now that he’s dead they can’t organize a bloody festival to insult his art fast enough.”

“But Deidara-senpai, I thought insulting Sasori’s art was your number one past time!”

“Of course it was. He never understood true art, yeah? Not even close.”

Tobi made a comically-energetic shrug gesture.

“Then what’s got your panties in a twist?”

Deidara snarled. It was an enraged sound that didn’t quite coalesce into words, but instead climbed in pitch until it sounded more like a whine than growl. Abruptly it broke off, and Zetsu heard Deidara take a deep breath. 

“Sasori no Danna was wrong about art, but these people don’t even  _ care _ about it, yeah.”

Deidara’s chakra ignited inside him like a wildfire about to rage out of control, and down beneath his feet Zetsu felt it and knew that he had picked the right person for this job.

Black Zetsu’s vicious smile stretched over onto White Zetsu’s face, where it turned bland and emotionless, and together they began to rise from the depths of the earth to watch.

When he broke the surface, he didn’t immediately draw attention to himself. If he showed himself to soon, the distraction might temper some of Deidara’s fury. 

Spread before them was a village that come tomorrow would be nothing but smoldering ashes. Villagers bustled to and fro, big smiles and bright, multi-colored lanterns lending a celebratory air to their preparations. A curious lack pervaded the scene; the news of their conqueror’s death had allowed them to release the tension and low-grade fear that had haunted them since their continued existence became dependent on Sasori’s whims. The news was fresh, like just-dawned sunlight, and comfort and contentedness had yet to fully unfurl into it from whatever dark corner of these people’s minds they’d retreated to. 

Black Zetsu understood Deidara’s quietly simmering fury. To his surprise, so did White Zetsu. 

For a second, something welled up in White Zetsu’s mind. Something too blurry and unformed to be a proper memory but too familiar not to be dangerous. Images of a town very different from this one in architectural style and layout flitted through the place where what passed for synapses Zetsu’s body connected White to Black. In the background rose a mountain identical to the one visible in the distance from their tree, and the river that snaked lazily into the forest flowed along the seems in the earth as the one Zetsu had passed beneath on their way here. 

White Zetsus were not supposed to be able to remember anything from before they were White Zetsu, much less be able to recognize the place where their village used to stand even after the original village had been razed to the ground. The Tree was supposed to leech everything about them away until they were just empty clay vessels in the shape of people. 

Black Zetsu’s disquiet took on a tinge of real alarm.

He slid the rest of the way out of the tree before those thoughts could properly coalesce into something meaningful in their shared brain.

Deidara and Tobi turned at the sound of his approach. Deidara’s hand was fisted around the collar of Tobi’s cloak, as though he’d paused mid-shake. 

“Zetsu, help me!” Tobi cried mockingly. “Deidara-senpai is assaulting me!”

“What a sorry excuse of an Akatsuki member you are, yeah, if you’ve gotta go running to Zetsu every time your mouth writes a check your body can’t cash.”

White Zetsu smiled blandly. Black Zetsu’s mouth didn’t twitch. 

“I’m glad to see you both so lively. Are you ready for your mission?”

Deidara frowned and released Tobi. 

“Do I get to blow somebody up?”

Pein had said to be stealthy and avoid drawing too much attention to themselves. But it didn’t really matter. After all, everyone knew how little self-control Deidara had. If Zetsu said Deidara had a little temper tantrum, no one would disbelieve him.

A wild, dangerous gleam had appeared in Deidara’s eyes. His snarling, stretched-tight hand-lips twisted the lines of his palms out of shape. Zetsu could just hear the gnashing of teeth before Deidara’s finger curled into a fist. No, no one would believe this mad, out-of-control creature over Zetsu, if it came down to it. 

Still smiling blandly, he handed Deidara a small scroll with the mission details on it.

“It’s your lucky day, Deidara. Go wild. Just make sure you bring back the scroll with that symbol on it from the temple without anyone realizing it’s you.”

Deidara seized the mission scroll before Zetsu even finished speaking. It crinkled hard under his clenched fingers, and Zetsu thought he heard the teeth in his palms biting into the paper.

“Consider it done, yeah.”

The hand that wasn’t holding the scroll started flitting through a series of hand signs. As he and Tobi watched, Deidara’s hair bled red and his skin took on a polished wooden sheen. By the time his hands fell still, Sasori’s undead face was staring back at them where Deidara’s used to be.

Despite himself, Zetsu was impressed. He had known Deidara had taken it upon himself to research genjutsu ever since his forced recruitment by Itachi, but he hadn’t known that the kid had made actual progress. 

Unfortunately, the kid’s acting skills still left something to be desired. The deranged smile that lit up his disguised face was all Deidara. 

“Tobi, you can take care of yourself for a few minutes, yeah? Why don’t you scram for a little bit, and meet me back here after.”

* * *

Black Zetsu kept tabs on his White half while Deidara rampaged. 

The sparks of recognition White Zetsu had felt when he’d laid eyes on the landscape surrounding Kocchimachi were still there, flaring back to life each time his eyes alighted on another familiar landmark. A rolling hill littered with boulders, a field left clear of both trees and crops over to the west, a temple so old it might date back to even before the Warring States period- each one left Black Zetsu more unsettled. Had he had less self-control, he might have even felt a flicker of anger.

He melted into the bark of a tree overlooking Kocchimachi and settled in to watch the destruction. 

Deidara wasn’t hard to spot. A ripple of jerky, terrified motion spread out from where he strode angrily through the crowd. He hadn’t even made it down the block before the screaming started. He twisted Sasori’s face, normally wooden and limited in its expressions by the nature of Sasori’s artificial jaw, into an enormous grin that turned demonic in the unsteady light of the lanterns. 

The first row of lanterns suddenly flared sun-bright, then exploded into the crowded streets. The screams got louder.

“That’s right, you fuckers!” Deidara screamed over the hysterics of the crowd, not even bothering to mimic Sasori’s speech patterns. “You better run, yeah!”

**“We’ll need to get rid of him soon,”** Black Zetsu muttered. 

“We might not need to,” White Zetsu replied. “Sasori’s death sent him so far off the deep end, he’s obviously never going to get better. Either someone else will put him out of his misery, or he’ll take himself out of the equation.”

On the street below, Deidara stumbled over one of Sasori’s puppets that a fleeing villager had dropped in their desperation to escape. He stared at it for a second, letting his obscured features twist further and further beyond Sasori’s original expression range, until he finally shrieked something unintelligible and started beating the puppet with his bare fists. 

“Why are you still here?” He screamed at the doll. “Why are you fucking things still haunting me?!” 

His hand mouths spit up small chunks of clay with each strike, leaving malformed streaks and blobs of clay scattered across the puppet’s surface. 

“I give him two months, tops,” White Zetsu said. 

“Katsu!” Deidara screamed mid-punch. The half-destroyed puppet exploded on queue, sending flaming debris flying out into the surrounding crowd and blowing Deidara himself halfway down the street. One of the pieces of burning wood went through the open window of a clothing store, and smoke began to pour out almost immediately. 

“Did you see that, Sasori no Danna? I’ve wanted to do that for years, you fucker! If you had just managed to not fucking die, I wouldn’t be able to do this, yeah. It’s all your fault! Katsu!”

**“Two months is too generous,”** Black Zetsu replied. 

The fire in the clothing store quickly blazed into an inferno and began to spread to neighboring stores. Once Deidara stumbled to his feet and started moving again, random explosions joined the growing flames. 

Black Zetsu watched the flames consume the town with satisfaction. Perhaps he’d come up with an excuse to send Kisame here and rip the landscape apart with his overpowered water jutsus until there was nothing left that White Zetsu could look at and be reminded of his old home. Let him turn the whole cursed place into a lake and fill in with sharks. 

After all, did this land not belong to the scum that had once dared to hunt down his Mother like a common criminal? Had the people of this land not been cast aside their Rabbit Goddess the moment her traitorous sons decided to seal her away, all those generations ago?

Yes. Let them burn. 

White Zetsu stared serenely out over the bloody scene, and imagined the sight of a raging chakra user bringing hell down upon a powerless populace was somehow familiar. 

* * *

When Deidara returned hours later, covered in ash and scroll in hand, Zetsu smiled and took it from him. Behind them, the remains of the village smoldered gently. 


End file.
